The 4 Kinds of Work: Housework, Invisible, Hobby & Unique Purpose - #503

Today's mailbag comes to us from Sarah. It happened. I got my Organized 365 money back for upgrading to the Productive Home Solution. I have a section in my binder for car repairs. Last year, August of 2021 to be exact, my car died and I had to get my transmission filter replaced and some other transmission accessories. This means nothing to me, so the information went in one ear and out the other. Fast forward a year and my car is making a rattling noise. The dealership wants to replace the transmission filter, fluid, etc., because it's over 100,000 miles and maybe that'll help. I said to wait because something was done last year. I ran home from the pool and checked my binder. Everything they wanted to do was done less than a year ago. I read off all of the stuff on this receipt and the mechanic said, no, we don't want to do that again. We're We're going to check that everything is tightened and it'll be ready in an hour. Nothing was structurally wrong. It's just an old minivan and sometimes things loosen and they don't run silently. I just saved $400 and a day without my car. Bam! Organized 365 for the win. I am so ecstatic right now. Do you have an Organized 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize 365.

Welcome to the Organize 365 podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting, functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you, so let's get started. Hobby work, invisible work, housework, unique purpose work— these are all works that we do at home. They are all Unpaid, and it is where all of our time is going at home. Have you ever wondered why you don't come home from wherever you've been, just sit down, kick your feet up, turn on the TV, grab some chips, and just chill out for the rest of the day? When was the last time you did that? Have you ever done that? Even when you're a teenager, you don't do that. You're like, wait a minute. No, no, no, no. I have teenagers. I know that they're doing that. No, no, no, no. Teenagers have housework, visible work, schoolwork, extracurricular work. And if they're coming in, sitting down, grabbing the chips and watching TV, they're just avoiding the work that they should be doing, or they're gearing up for the work that they should be doing. I think the biggest lie that has been fed to us as human beings is that if you go to school and you do your work and you clean up your room, when you get older, you can live on your own and then you will be in charge of the house. And then what is implied there is, and there will be no more work to do.

Right?

I mean, it doesn't make sense when I say it out loud, but didn't you think that too? Like, I always thought that when I got to be the adult, I got to make the rules. And my rule was gonna be that I didn't have to do work at home and I would be able to play. Now, I didn't watch my mother play at home. My dad did play a lot of golf, like 4 or 5 rounds of golf per week, people. That's a lot of golf. He went to work, And then he went to golf work. And then he did, he came home, mom made dinner or he grilled, and then he watched a little bit of TV and he went to bed. I guess when I got older, I wanted to be a man. I don't know. My mom never stopped working. As a matter of fact, she worked so much, she started a business in our basement and my sister and I worked for her. So if we weren't doing schoolwork, I wasn't babysitting work, or we weren't helping with cleaning work, Including vacuuming for my dad every single day, then I was making money working for my mom in the basement. And I thought it was normal. I thought all this was normal. You know why? It is normal. Working at home is normal. The idea that we would become adults, get a house, and not work, that is not normal. And I feel like we are all chasing, or I know at least I am chasing, A future retirement age when we could stop working. You know what's going to happen then? It's just different kinds of work. Still work. And also then you're bored. So we're just chasing a future that doesn't even exist. And when we get there, we're going to be like, oh, I didn't know this is what I was chasing. So I want to really break down these 4 kinds of work. We're all doing them. I want to call them to your attention. I want to label them so we can continue to discuss them. Number one is housework. I'm not going to talk about this one very much because I've been talking about it for the last two years since we've done our research. We have really honed in on and defined what is the work that is being done at home. First kind of work: cleaning. You have to clean to a certain cleanliness level so that your house is healthy. Two is tasks of daily living: laundry, meal planning. Cleaning your own body, basically all the tasks of being a human that follow you on vacation and from the time you're born until the time you pass away. 3 is organization. And by organization, I don't mean making everything rainbow in your house. I mean that you just put things away. Everything has a place, you put things away. You may say, well, if everything had a place, Lisa, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. Well, that's because somewhere along the way, your house got unorganized, and so it needs to be reorganized.

Mm-hmm.

But for housework, we're just talking about straightening up at the end of the day, putting things away. And then 4 is maintenance. Housework takes a ridiculous amount of time. The Pew Research Institute does regular studies on how much time this kind of work takes doing at home and without children, not counting children. It takes like 18 to 25 hours a week. It's a ridiculous amount of work. You have A part-time house workshop. You or the people you live with, somebody, somebody is doing these things or they're not, and then you're living with the ramifications of that. But someone's cleaning the underwear, someone's putting food in the refrigerator, or you're buying fast food. Like, somehow you're feeding yourself. Like, this work is not optional. This work is happening. This is housework. I I feel like I and everyone else didn't realize there was work of being an adult. I don't know why we didn't think there was work of being an adult, and we're resentful that we have to work as an adult. So that's housework. It is what it is. It's a couple hours a day. You gotta do it. Then there's invisible work, and this is the work that's talked about in Fair Play, the book by Eve Rodsky. It's talked about in the media ad nauseam. The invisible work, the mental load of running a household. It's in addition to housework. Housework is actually what you could see, like the cleaning is, if you were to hire a maid service to come in, it would be done. The invisible work, this is basically the Sunday basket. Anything that you would do in the Sunday basket, that's what people are labeling invisible work. Let me give you some examples of what this invisible work is. Scheduling doctor's appointments. Planning for different seasons, the holidays, and parties. Processing and setting up organization systems. Everything related to bill pay. Anything that needs to be ordered. Taking care of pets. Everything related to travel. Everything related to the Wi-Fi, electronics, Cable, computers, TVs that are in your home. Gift buying, thank you cards, holiday cards. These are— this is all work. You may not do every single thing on that list, but you do a majority of those things on that list. And it was definitely not in that first list I gave you of housework. It's different work. It's not housework. Not everybody's doing it. It's not done every single week. It's done like random one-offs, but also Happens. Like, Christmas is the same time every single year. Like Dave Ramsey loves to say, it shouldn't be a surprise, comes every December. Like, you know you're gonna have a birthday every single year. So these things have to be done. The bills get paid every week, every month, every quarter, every year. Like, it's not a surprise. But also, they don't fit in that first part of housework. They're not tests of daily living, they're not cleaning, they're not organizing, they're not maintenance. They're like the invisible work of being a human. That's everything that's in the Sunday basket. Now, I wanna talk about this invisible work on another level, because I think that once you get a Sunday basket going, the first 6 weeks, it takes a lot of time. Because first of all, you're making all of the invisible work visible, which is overwhelming. You're like, I didn't realize I was doing this much. Why am I doing this much? Do I have to do this much? Yes. Yes, you do. Now, after we're done throwing a pity party for ourselves, we're like, oh, fine, fine, I'll do it. So you get your Sunday basket going, and about week 6, you're like, yes! What was I worried about? This is so easy. I don't even know if it was a Sunday basket. I think I'm really this good and I don't even need this Sunday basket. Some of you stop your Sunday basket then. I also did. That's how I know that you do this. And you could coast for like another four to six weeks until you're right back to where you started from. You're like, why don't I have any time? Why am I so stressed? Why am I yelling at everyone that comes to the house except for the Amazon guy? And then you're like, oh, maybe that little Sunday basket thing was more powerful than I realized. So you start doing the Sunday basket again, and you're back to being a happy person. Then there is this new thing, and it's called emergency. Invisible work. There's invisible work that you can make visible through the Sunday Basket and create a system and habits and process. And even though what you go through on Sunday isn't always exactly the same, you know, it's going to be around an hour and a half. It might balloon all the way out to 3 hours, but it's not never-ending. It's like not never-ending. It's just like, oh, I had this one week where it was 3 hours and now it's back to 90 minutes. I got it back under control. Like, I had to go through and automate all my bill pay, or it was the holidays and I had to plan out and order online all of the gifts that we were gonna do, or I was planning a new trip and we needed to get suitcases. I needed to get luggage tags and I needed to make arrangements for the pets. And so it took extra long, but it's not a regular occurrence thing. And then you have these emergency invisible works. The first emergency invisible work. Is an illness. Oh, geez. We can't even say this anymore because of COVID because in the past you're like, oh yeah, yeah, you get the flu and then you're down a week. And now it's like, first you have to quarantine forever, and then you actually get the COVID and pretty soon, you know, it's been like a year since you've seen humans. Emergency invisible work. Obviously, if you're sick or somebody in your family is sick, you have to take care of the sick person. But here's what's so rude: the world does not stop and wait for you while you or the people in your family are sick. They they just keep on going. The bills keep coming. The laundry keeps coming. More laundry comes, actually. The paid work keeps coming. The I mean the world they just they just go on with their merry way, and they ignore the fact that you or your family are ill. And so now you're also pretending that you're either not ill or there's nobody ill in your family. Oh no! We're fine over here. It's fine. We're fine. We're fine. So what do you need me to do? Yeah, let me get back to this because if you don't, then you gotta do that when you're better. And then when you are better, there's so much work to do. See what I'm saying? It's really inconvenient to be sick, right? Like really only as a kid is it convenient to be sick 'cause you get to skip school and then you get to sit on the couch and eat chips and watch TV.

Other than that.

It creates so much more work when you're sick. First, you have to triage and get yourself the medical care and the prescriptions and whatever in order to get well. And then also the housework doesn't go away and the regular invisible work doesn't go away. So you or somebody else has to do all of that. And then the piling up of the actual paid work that you missed, Or any other obligations that just got postponed. Much better to just cancel entirely, by the way. Get moved on to the next couple weeks. Oh my goodness, it's so hard to be sick. It creates so much emergency invisible work. And that creates a second kind of emergency invisible work, which is schedule changes. Which let's just call a spade a spade, can we please? Scheduling changes are an every single day of your life occurrence. If you are waiting until the point where you are so organized and productive that there are not going to be schedule changes, don't hold your breath. You'll be dead. It's not a thing. There are always schedule changes every single day of everything. Like, okay, so last night, 3 AM, The smoke alarm in our hallway started beeping, which means it needs a new battery. And when it starts beeping, Hunter hides and pants and cries in the closet, even if you change the battery. So I think I hear the smoke alarm battery and I'm like, that wasn't the smoke alarm battery, was it? 3 o'clock in the morning. 15 minutes later, another beep. Was that really the smoke alarm battery? Because I don't want to get out of bed. 10 minutes later, smoke alarm back. Okay, so now it is what, 3:30? So I've been awake for half an hour listening for a beep that obviously is still gonna— fine. Go downstairs, get the 9-volt battery. Luckily I have the 9-volt battery because there have been many years where I didn't even have that battery in stock. Now we have the battery in stock. So see, organization is, it is helpful. So I get the battery. Matter of fact, I have a dozen of them. That's That's how many I have. Go upstairs, change the smoke alarm battery, it stops beeping.

3:30.

Did I fall back asleep? No. Did Greg fall back asleep? No. Did Hunter ever fall back asleep? Nope. Yeah, I got 5 hours of sleep because— The emergency invisible work of changing The battery in the smoke detector, that you never know when it's going to die. And so now when I get home from work tonight, it is on my to-do list, which I haven't written down, which I need to write down as soon as I get done recording this podcast, to change the 9-volt battery in the other 2 smoke detectors. Because if this one just beeped, then those are gonna beep. But do you know what the likelihood of me actually writing that down when I'm done doing this podcast and remembering it are?

Zero.

Like 10%, which means I'm not going to. I'm gonna get home, I'm going to totally forget. And then later this week or this month, I either will remember that I said this because I'm saying it again so that maybe I'll remember it, but I probably won't. Another one is gonna beep. And then I will actually change both of them in the middle of the night, which is probably what I should just start doing. And I'll have another night where I only get 5 hours. See what I'm saying? This isn't in any productivity manual. This isn't in any checklist. I mean, this is emergency invisible work. Emergency invisible work because the dog is now all up in arms about the smoking. There was no fire. There's no good story to tell at work the next day. You're just tired and cranky. Joey had to go and get me coffee before I recorded this podcast because I only had 5 hours of sleep. And now we're going to be tired all week. because our smoke detector battery blinked. And this is part of the work that is done at home. Emergency invisible work that nobody accounts for in our energy level for the rest of this week, right? There are 2 other, and I'm not gonna go into great detail about these, but 2 other emergency invisible works, and they are childcare and caregiving for adults. You may be like, Whoa, wait, what? You're just gonna like gloss over that, Lisa? Yeah, I am, because you know what? I just don't have that much time. It is, I mean, if you are a parent and, or you are a full-time caregiver for an adult, it is a full-time 24/7 job. Like the fact that we pretend that you can have children and this isn't gonna become like the rest of your life's work, I don't know. What were you smoking? Like, like, like, I am never not thinking about my children and my grandchild. Like, once you become a parent, once you become responsible for another adult, you think about yourself and then you think about them. You think about, and sometimes you think about them and then you think about yourself, and then you just get to the point where you just think about them and you don't think about yourself anymore. You're like, yeah, well, okay, uh, this is the rest of my life now. Like, Parenting is not work. Parenting is your life. Like, I just can't even classify it in this whole conversation, but I feel like I need to mention it because, yeah, parents just don't sit down and they don't sleep well, like, forever. I'm not trying to be birth control or anything, but it's true. Like, Abby will never not think about Grayson, ever. So it is work and it creates an unbelievable amount of emergencies, an unbelievable amount of invisible work that you cannot even quantify if I were to record 500 podcasts about it. So I choose in Organized 365 to really focus on you, the individual, and on what you can control and on your organization and your productivity, because you as an individual will decide Whether or not you're going to have children or are blessed with children unexpectedly, or will find yourself in the opportunity to be able to care for someone else, or will start a business or run for politics or start a foundation or be part of a growing company that you believe in their mission or whatever. You'll do whatever you're gonna do. Like, your life is gonna be your life. And so I try to focus on What can you control and what is just of you? The housework related to where you live, the invisible work related to your life, the emergency invisible work that I just mentioned. If you are a parent, if you are a caregiver, that is a career. You may not have chosen it, but it is now your career and you can find other organizing resources for that. Okay, so we've talked about housework, we've talked about invisible work. So what the heck is hobby work? Oh yes. When Angela Watson was on the podcast this last summer, she talked about hobby work and I cannot get that term outta my head. Like, it is just such a great description. So she was talking about it as teachers and I, I was a teacher, I am a teacher. Teachers are awesome. Teachers do a lot of hobby work, and I thought it was hilarious that she mentioned this. So there's the work of a teacher. A teacher obviously has to create lesson plans, has to teach students, has to follow the policies and procedures of the school district that they're in. They need to do all the paperwork. And as a teacher, like, you work all the hours, basically all the hours. You just work all the time. And we love it. Like we do. That's why we went into the teaching profession. Just like nurses and doctors love treating patients, that's why they went into healthcare. They don't like the politics and the extra paper and all the extra— you know, any job you have is going to have administrative red tape. Nobody likes the administrative red tape, but the administrative red tape is created, I don't know why, just because it's necessary. It needs to be there. You have to do it. So when we think about Our jobs, all of our jobs, our paid work, and the esoteric work that we have to do that we just feel is unnecessary, busy work. We try to organize and streamline and reduce that as much as possible. So that's what we do inside of the Education Workbox, for example. We reduce and streamline And get rid of as much of that extra work that we have to do. Here's what I know to be true though. We fill up our time with work. We do. We like to be busy. We like to be productive. We like to be contributing members of society. And so we end up doing work. So what is hobby work at home?

Oh.

There is the essential work of housework. There is the essential work of invisible work. There's the essential work of emergency invisible work, and then there is hobby work. And hobby work is the extra work that we do either to make ourselves feel better or to make it look a certain way, or because we're bored and we don't know what we wanna do, so we're just gonna redo something that's already been done so it looks just a little bit better so we feel a little bit better about it. Wow, do I do a lot of hobby work! Like as Angela was talking about it, I was like, oh, I am like I'm like a hobby work expert. I'm an expert hobby worker. I love to do. I love to redo things that are already done for no good reason. Like, do you do this? So here's some great examples of work that we do at home that is hobby work. And before I give these, I want to call your attention to a couple of podcasts ago where I have the 80/20. Rule of Housework. If you haven't listened to that podcast episode, basically that whole podcast episode really explains the difference between the essential work you need to do and then the hobby work that you do on top of it. Because functional organizing, basic cleaning, it really, it takes time, definitely takes time, but it doesn't take an exorbitant amount of time if you have a good checklist, if you have a good system. But if you're trying to make some magical, get some A+ grade on your vacuuming, you're going to take a ridiculous amount of time vacuuming when really you could vacuum the whole entire space once a week or once a month and then just hit the high traffic areas every other time you vacuum, right? But sometimes we move the furniture every time and really get in all the crevices. Like, unless you are a housekeeper, you don't really need to do that in your house every single time you vacuum. You could just hit the high traffic areas and every 4th time maybe vacuum closer to the furniture. I only move my furniture if I'm getting the carpets cleaned. You see what I'm saying? That's the difference between just getting the job done and sometimes doing hobby work. You're like, no, Lisa, that's being, you know, an excellent vacuumer. That's being a perfect vacuumer. Exactly. Anything where you say, but I'm being excellent, I'm being perfect at this. You're at hobby level.

What?

We're taught that hobbies are like something that you do in your free time. Exactly. Something you're doing in your free time. You're like, but I don't have any free time. Exactly. If you would stop doing that, you'd have more free time. Your hobby work is robbing you of your free time. You're using your free time to make things perfect that don't need to be at a perfect standard. Hobby work is overwork. It's overorganizing. It's making really cute checklists instead of a basic checklist. It's reorganizing a closet that's pretty much already organized. It's folding baby clothes. I'm just going to say it. I don't know why we fold anything that Grayson has. He wears it so quickly. He outgrows it so quickly. I just like the 2 laundry basket system. One laundry basket is dirty, one laundry basket is clean. When the laundry basket that is dirty gets too full, we throw it in the washing machine, it becomes the clean basket, and the other one becomes dirty again. There's— he only wears diapers, onesies, shorts, and pants. Like, there's not that many clothes. He's 1 year old. You don't have to fold. Baby clothes. Here's another one. You don't need to match socks. I do. I like to. Greg totally stopped years ago. He just shoves them all in a drawer and he just pulls a couple out. You don't have to. Buy all the same kind of socks. You never have to match them again. I know it's craziness because it seems so like barbarian. How could you possibly have a sock drawer just full of all black socks? Well, if they're all the same kind of sock, here's something that's helpful. If you get a hole in one, you could just pair it with another one. It's really great. Everybody in your family should pick their favorite kind of socks, and then you just buy them each a dozen pair. Done. Preferably, if they all have different kinds of socks, it's really easy to sort when you're done with the laundry. Do you need to fold underwear? I mean, I do. But my kids don't. You need it to be clean. You don't need it to be folded. I fold my clothes because I like the way it works, but it is hobby work, especially when you refold a drawer that's already pretty much folded. Here's another one I'm very, very, very guilty of. I'm already doing it again. This is micro Organizing kids' toys.

Haha!

I'm just gonna say it. 50% of the time when I was actually playing with my kids, I was just organizing their toys for fun. I wasn't really playing. I know, you might do it too. My grandson Grayson is 1 year old. He's adorable. He has a little basket that we have kind of like as a toy box, And then we have a little cube, one of those IKEA cubes that has 4 cubes that we put the diapers and stuff in, and on the bottom, 2 shelves. I've bought him little Montessori toys, ridiculously overpriced. He totally doesn't use them correctly. And I put 'em on the little shelves like you would do when you're a preschool teacher, 'cause I was a preschool teacher. And he takes everything off of those shelves and spreads them all over the room. And then he climbs right over to that little basket. And he looks in there and he digs around and he can find his favorite toys already. I was like, he's like looking for something. And he got his favorite little toy out and then he crawled away with it. I was like, unbelievable. I'm not a big fan of toy boxes or bins that are unorganized. Like, I'm just not a fan of them at all. Uh, but he already knows how to use one and he's 1. So So I was like stacking up all the toys and all the things and putting them on the shelf. And the other day I was like, first of all, why am I cleaning up this room? It's not my baby, but he plays up here. So, and I like my family room to be clean, so I'm cleaning up. So I'm like, fine, whatever, cleaning up. And I'm like restacking it. And I was like, Lisa, you are hobby working here. You are overworking. You would rather be having a hot bath than doing your puzzle. Throw it all in the toy basket and be done. So I did. 5 seconds, picked everything up, threw it in the toy basket, and off I went. There were little stacking cups and I did not stack them together. There were, um, all these little pieces that went on those little sorters, you know, where you have the, um, like the rings that go on the sorters. But with this really cool one Stephanie gave us, has 3 different spindles, has 3 different shapes, and they go in a rainbow order. And normally I have it all perfect and I Through the whole thing in the bin, not even on the spindles. I'm just like chucking pieces over into the toy bin because you know what? By the time I get home from work today, it'll be all over my floor again. That is hobby work. Now, when Grayson gets a little bigger and he actually figures out how to use the Montessori toys, I have in my mind that I actually will have just a minimal amount of toys upstairs and they will be on the shelves correctly and I will teach them the Montessori way. The odds of this happening are like, again, 10%. It's not happening. Just, it's not happening. But this is what we do. We have this idealistic idea in our head. We want our physical reality to match this idealistic picture in our head. While we're thinking about this idealistic picture and we're making our physical spaces match this idealistic picture, we forget about the actual humans that are going to interact with these toys or whatever picture it is we're doing. We get it exactly how we want it, and then our family comes in the room and then we bite their head off because they do not live the way our imaginary family in our head that is using our hobby work thinks. Oh, you haven't done that? Because I sure have. And it's not pretty. It's really not pretty. When I go on my little tirades and then I leave to go get onion rings and I come back and everybody's happy I went to get onion rings and they hope it takes me 4 hours. When I get back and they all look at me like, you're the meanest mom on the planet. Why do the toys have to be on the shelf? I'm like, you know what? They don't. He doesn't care they're in a basket. Abby doesn't care they're in a basket. Why do I care that they're in a basket? Put them in a basket. Move on. I'm the grandma. I go through this whole entire story because for you, it might be where the dishes are located or how the laundry room is used or where the toiletries are kept or How the, whatever. Like you have a thing just like I do where you're like, but in my head it's so perfect. And then when I put my human family in here, it's just not. I don't do this one, but you might do this one, which is overcleaning. I cleaned it, I'm gonna clean it again. I'm gonna clean it again. I'm gonna clean it again. I'm gonna clean it. Newsflash, it's gonna get dirty. Cut your cleaning in half. It's overclean. Everything, everybody's gonna be fine. So we do this hobby work and then we wonder why we have no free time. After I'm restacking up baby toys for 20 minutes when I could clean 'em up in 2 minutes, that gives me 18 minutes. And the whole point of this entire podcast is that I want you to have time for what you're uniquely created to do. And if you're so busy doing housework, invisible work, emergency invisible work, and hobby work, You will have no extra time for unique purpose work because it's nearly impossible for the female head of the household to prioritize unique purpose work over housework, invisible work, emergency invisible work, and hobby work. You will prioritize your hobby work over your unique purpose work every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The only time that you will start to prioritize your unique purpose work Over any of that other work is once, just now we're going to go all the way back to the passive organizing episode, is when you are so clear about what you're uniquely created to do that the pain of not bringing that into the world, of not creating that for the world, for society, for humanity, is greater than— The pain of not doing it. Getting an A+ on your housework. And I'm just going to be honest, for most women, we don't know what we're uniquely created to do. We feel it's selfish to even think about it. So I'm going to go do some hobby work and I'm going to get a really cute checklist printed out. I'm going to vacuum that family room like you've never seen. And boy, are those toys going to look adorable, even though I really should be taking a nap instead. And my house is going to look good and I'm going to feel like I have an A. And when we wonder why there aren't more women running companies, women in the boardroom, women running for politics, women in science and technology, it is because we have self-imposed an A+ system or grade that we can get on our housework. On our invisible work, on our emergency invisible work, and our hobby work that we are getting. You're getting it at the expense of what? And let me just be very clear, it is really uncomfortable to start to prioritize your unique purpose work because your family's going to push back. Society is going to push back, and your internal A+ want-to-getter is going to say, oh, you're not doing— I don't know, that's good enough for so-and-so over there, but really, you need to really look at this cleaning. Your cleaning is, you know, it's just not as good as it could be around here. What do you mean you're not going to match socks? What heathen does not match socks? Who Who told you we didn't match socks anymore? Like, you need to spend 5 minutes every single week matching socks. You cannot have that 5 weeks for something else. You have to match socks. What do you mean you're gonna have your family do their own laundry? I know they could do it, but you know, it would be nicer if you did it for them. I know, I know. Somebody else can buy the gifts and wrap the gifts or decorate for the holidays or plan the party or do the bills, but really, really, you do it the best. Why are you going to put that on them? You should just, you should just do that for your family. You're good at it. You've done it for 20 years. Why are you going to not do that? What do you mean you're going to throw all of the baby's toys in a bin? Don't you want him to see an example of a well-organized house, of what a preschool classroom would look like? Really? What are you— so you're going to save yourself 90 minutes a week? What are you going to do with that 90 minutes? You might as well just get all— get an A. Get your whole checklist done. Make sure that the house looks perfect in case anybody comes over. And when we are in that train of thought, and I could do that so quickly and easily because it's the thoughts I had just this week, just this week. But you know what other thoughts I've had? And I'm going to feel guilty even saying these out loud. Oh my gosh. I deserve to be able to travel as a female CEO and meet other Business owners, audience members, move forward the certification program, try to get on local TV, you know, do mastermind. It's okay for me to start traveling. I don't have any kids at home anymore, but now there's a grandchild that lives with me and now I feel like I have to be home at 4:30 and that I can't go out at night. Abby goes out at night more than I do and I watch the baby, but I feel guilty if I do. I'm gonna feel guilty when I'm traveling and she's gonna have a college class and I'm not there watching the baby. I'm gonna feel guilty. And we do this to ourselves. It's not that one is better than the other, or you clearly can't have 'em both. Like, I cannot travel for work and also be home every night and support Abby and Grayson. So then the question is, The housework is done. The invisible work is done in the Sunday basket for us. The emergency invisible work I'm always going to prioritize over everything, including schedule changes. I have eliminated all hobby work at home so that I have more time to do my unique purpose work, which is growing Organized 365. If I didn't do that, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, so you must like it a little bit, right? But you have to really, especially as a female head of household, identify that you are not going to do your unique purpose work and not do housework, invisible work, emergency invisible work, and hobby work. You have to consciously systematize, outsource, delegate, figure it out, all of those kinds of works before you have unique purpose work. And some of you have said to me, okay, Lisa, So the goal is to get organized so I have more time to do what I'm uniquely created to do. What am I uniquely created to do? I can't answer that for you, but I could give you these 2 things. Number one, the Embrace On Demand experience is where you figure that out. It is a 2-day choreographed event that walks you through eliminating a lot of this work, Figuring out where your place is in society right now, what season you're in right now, and then starting to remember how to dream again, how to dream big dreams, little dreams, organize them, and take the first actions in what you're uniquely created to do. So the Embrace on-demand experience, that is what that is for. But secondly, if you go back 2 episodes and you listen to Passive Organizing, and I told you that for 12 to 18 months, You're going to research organizing before you even do your first organizing thing through books and podcasts and free blitzes and information, yada yada. You think you're not going to do that with what you're uniquely created to do? This is just organizing a house, which you're either going to do or not do. But what you're uniquely created to do, your God-given talent, you're the thing that can bless your, your family, your community, and possibly the world. You think that's not going to take 12 to 18 months of pondering before you get started? And then once you get started, you think it's going to be done in a weekend? Oh my gosh, this is the rest of your life. It's the rest of your life. So yeah, there's a lot more weight to it, right? So if passive organizing takes 12 to 18 months of just thinking about if you even want to commit to Doing something like organizing, figuring out what you're uniquely gifted and created to do, researching and pondering and thinking about how that might manifest and how you can create something out of nothing is going to take at least 12 to 18 months before you even know what your first steps are going to be. And the only way to figure out what your first steps are going to be in that 12 to 18 months— is to devote as much time to what you're uniquely created to do as you are to passively organizing. Whoa. That's a lot of time. It's a lot of time. What are your favorite podcast episodes? I produce at least 2 a week. So you're listening to 90 minutes to 2 hours of Organized 365 podcasts a week, possibly. If this is one of your favorite podcasts. So if this is the only source of organization information that you have, which I highly doubt it is, then that's 2 hours a week of passively organizing before you take your first step. But more likely you're listening to other organizing podcasts. You're watching the organizing TV shows. You've gotten all the organizing books. You've probably tried other organize, and you're trying to figure out not only do you wanna organize, but which organizer do you want to be your teacher? Or which couple of organizers do you want to be your teacher? Which usually doesn't work as well. You usually— it's better if you have like one primary at least that you're following one system and you can like add adjunct courses on. But it doesn't work if you're following all the organizers. You're just going to have like a migraine. So if you want to figure out what you're uniquely gifted and created to do, you need a lot of thinking time. You need a lot of exploration. Exploration time. And it all needs to be focused on you, which we're not good at. We would much rather be an excellent housekeeper, an excellent invisible work doer, an excellent hobby work around the house person. But you have to have your time back in order to challenge yourself and research and think about what you're uniquely created to do. So that's the Organized 365 mission, is to help you get organized so that you can get back your time. When you are organized, you have less housework. When you are organized, all your invisible work happens on Sunday. That's why you could do it in 90 minutes to 3 hours instead of 3 hours every day, which is what it's taking before you're organized. When you have those 2 done, then you can identify hobby work, either press into it, enjoy it, and love it, Or go, wow, nobody even notices if I don't dust. Nobody knew I was even vacuuming until you start walking around and things crunch under your feet. Like, not even necessary to do very often, right? Like, you're overcleaning, overorganizing, over everything. Nobody's noticing because you're trying to fill this hole, this unique purpose hole, with these Everyday maintenance tasks that are not what you're uniquely gifted and created to do, but you don't know what it is because you are so busy that you don't have a still small voice because you— what, are you afraid of what it's going to say? You're fabulous. You're amazing. It's all good things. But you could be called to do something pretty big. You'll never know if you're hiding in housework, invisible work, and hobby work though. I'm going to keep pressing into this because next week I'm going to talk about 6-figure time. For a long time, I mean, I used to listen to these podcasts, read these books about what it would be like to be a 6-figure income earner, like a lawyer, doctor. Like, oh my goodness, like how do those women do it?

How would I say—

I would always ask my friends who were, you know, high-powered executives or whatever, How do you do it? Or who traveled and had children, how do you do it? And I wasn't asking, how do you do it as in, ooh, how do you do that? Like you're picking that over something else. I was asking like, what does that look like? Show me an example, flesh it out for me. What would it look like if I actually had a job that made 6 figures? Like I don't even have a framework for that. As a schoolteacher. Like, I don't even understand that kind of money. And what I realized this summer was I have 6-figure time. What does— what even is that, Lisa? What is this new thing you're introducing us to? What is 6-figure time? Well, you have to understand passive organizing, and you have to understand all these 4 kinds of work that we're doing at home before you can ever get into what 6-figure time is. And that I'll share with you next week.